How many of you are running on autopilot right now? Caught in the throws of the holiday season, you feel stressed, overwhelmed, and run down. You race around, make sure everyone else is having a good time, toss your self-care routine out the window, and adopt an attitude of just getting through.

If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll probably discover that it’s not just the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas that you adopt this mentality. It is just amplified during this time, as finances, time, and health get stretched thin.

You look to New Year’s as a chance to get yourself back on track and make all those changes you’ve been wanting to make: “This is the year my resolutions will stick!”

The biggest hurdle I see in creating sustainable change is lack of present moment awareness.

If you focus on staying present instead of mulling over the past or anxiously awaiting the future, you can harness the power of your intention and make what seems impossible, possible. Obsessing about what you did and did not do in the past and fearfully projecting into the future is your fear mind limiting your potential.

Once you release the fear, you can stay rooted in the here and now and develop present moment awareness. You can begin to truly discover what you want more and less of in your life based on who you are NOW rather than on how you behaved in the past.

Recognize you are a work in progress, which is a process that thankfully never ends.

Realize that at any moment you can declare a Do Over.
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You can decide right now that negative experiences from your past will not predict your future. Now is not then, and no matter how familiar it may feel, this present moment has never happened before. Instead of fearing what may happen, harness the mind-blowing power of your intention to create what you want to happen.

Before you start thinking about those New Year’s Resolutions, here is a great exercise to get you grounded and on the path to sustainable change.

Three Lists to Change

List #1: What’s Not Serving Your Greatest Good?
Write down experiences, feelings, people, and circumstances that are not serving your greatest good. This is a list of anything that you are just not going to drag with you into 2014.

Process what you have written, share with a trusted friend, and burn it, releasing that negative energy back into the universe and out of your heart and mind. Consciously feel the release of this energy and be grateful.

List #2: What Are the Life Lessons Learned?
Write down what you have learned from your experiences on list #1. Even the most difficult situations have a gem; you just have to look. If you are not willing to find the lesson, you will not grow. You will continue to play out the same patterns.

Save this list.

List #3: What Is Your Dream Life?
Write down what your ideal life looks and FEELS like. This list should be written in the present tense and include all areas of your beautiful, amazing experience: love, health, family, wealth, friends, career, spirituality, etc. Let how you want to feel help you create what your dream looks like.

Put this list somewhere where you will see it often. When you look at it, take a second to close your eyes, take some deep breaths, and feel this ideal.

Allow yourself plenty of time to reflect before you craft your lists.

Remember: You are the architect of your life experience, so commit to creating your best year!

Share your lists here and get support from our amazing Positively Positive community in releasing the past and creating your dream life now!

Want to learn more?

Join us December 12 at 7:00 pm EST to discover how to make resolutions that stick. We will show you how you can step into your power to create the life you so deserve (and much more).

Patricia Moreno, Gabrielle Bernstein, Kate Northrup, Meggan Watterson, Alex Jamieson, Alisa Vitti, Michele Promaulayko, and I will show you—step-by-step—how we went from feeling overworked and underpaid to abundant and successful.

Live in NYC or Grab the Recording

Click HERE for tickets and more info.

Terri Cole is a licensed psychotherapist, transformation coach, and an expert at turning fear into freedom. Sign up for Terri’s weekly Tune Up Tips and follow her on Twitter.

*Image courtesy of aaronkaiser.